The Tiger Hunter and the Snake Prince
by Lunicole
Summary: Fill for the Kink Meme - Sebastian has spent too many years in the heartless modern world, too many evenings drinking alcohol that failed to kill him and looking at his abandoned riffle like it was some cheap whore.


_For a prompt from the Sherlock Kink Meme here : __ http : / sherlockbbc-fic . livejournal . com / 1 4 2 1 3 . html ? thread = 77991045_

_It's been sitting on my computer for ages, I'm so sorry..._

_Em, triggers for violence, dead people, blood and the usual MorMor mess ?_

* * *

><p>The Tiger looks at him with knowing eyes. Sebastian wonders why he's not dead yet. He should be. He has killed enough men to know that he should be. The blood from his abdomen makes abstract patterns on the ground. His head is dizzy. His wounds don't even hurt anymore. That must be how death feels like, it has to, that's how the dying looked like when he was watching them agonize at his feet.<p>

He wishes that the Beast would just finish him off. The mercy of he hunter is what differentiated civilized men from the savages. He thinks he doesn't mind dying, not that much anyway.

The Tiger looks at him with knowing eyes and suddenly Sebastian is cold, colder than death and he can't escape, not anymore, not ever and it hurts. Wild roars of rage fill his ears, the wild roars of the jungle, the wild roars of war. He wants it to stop, all of it, the icy fire that destroys his insides, the insufferable numbness that fills his head. It doesn't. The Tiger hasn't moved.

He sees, for a brief instant, the future. It burns his retinas, so bright, so incredibly luminous. Flames of light crawl up heir ways into his skull and eat away his conscience. Empires rise and fall, nations are born and wither away, great men achieve great things and time eats everything to oblivion with a gluttonous rage. Sebastian screams.

Then, it stops all at once. He's not in the jungle anymore, he's in his childhood house, back in England, the one he left never to return. The dining room in which he's standing is the same as in his souvenirs. The walls haven't changed, they have that same pompous, aristocratic air about them and deep burgundy colour. It's too dark in here, has always been, Sebastian had thought as a child. Why had Mother ever wanted to spend her evenings here, playing chess against herself, waiting for a husband that continuously cheated on her with actresses and wives of his associates ? The beautiful shut-in, in her gorgeous navy blue evening dress she only wore inside the house, had always been surrounded by men that could not love.

Longing slowly fills him. It's odd. He doesn't remember feeling this so strongly, so completely ever before. He's an outgrown boy, now, stuck inside a man's body, his favourite tin tin soldier still pressed in his left hand. He wants to cry but the tears won't fall. He's home and it hurts.

He reluctantly moves, feels the Persian carped hiss under his hunting boots. None of the servants are awake at this hour and his mother is probably crying in her room as usual. The air is cold, the heavy velvet curtains are shut. It's December in Sussex. Sebastian is irresistibly drawn to the abandoned chessboard, a half-won game still sketched on the table. He doesn't dare to move the pieces. He smiles, raises his hand to touch the white knight. It's hard and cold under his fingertips; he remembers the sound of marble hitting marble when played against Mother. She always won.

"Do you want to die, Sebastian Moran ?"

It's a little girl's voice that calls him, echoing in the silent house. He turns around and sees nothing. He takes a few steps back, closes his eyes, tries to think. It's harder that it should be. It takes him a few minutes to fully realise what is happening to him. He's dying, for real. It's not like in the jungle, where he didn't care, where everything was about pride and blood and the hunt. This is his life that is ending. He's not going to come back. Panic hits him, hard. His hands shake, his breath tremble and his whole body itches. He doesn't want to go yet, and if he could get his muscles to obey him, he would scream:

"Please, please, just let me live a little bit longer."

Everything goes black and he wakes up a few days later in his country estate in Cashmere. The servants are scared of him, more that they used to, only Leela dares to come in his room to bring him his meals. A fellow Englishman had found him hurt in the forest, recognised him as the writer of _Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas_, managed to get him home. He hadn't left a name, only a note, tiny nervous letters on expensive paper. Sebastian nearly rips it to pieces when he first reads it.

.

It's been a while since Sebastian last felt hunger. To be true, he doesn't even need to eat anymore. He doesn't like it either. Sometimes he fasts for days on end, not feeling anything more than a slight dryness in his mouth. Everything tastes like ashes to his tongue and even the delirious smokes of poppies can't get him to feel anything more than a light, teasing pleasure as Leela sucks him with exotic devotion.

He ends up smacking her face away, but even this doesn't feel good. It angers him, his body that refuses to obey him, the sensations that do not fill him, Leela's wide eyes of surprise as she looks up at him. He doesn't really know what happens next, or he doesn't want to know. Her frail body can only support a certain amount of beating and when Sebastian realises that she's not breathing anymore, his knuckles bloody and his breath uneven, he starts shaking.

When he drags his servant's dislocated body out of the mansion, he looks around, remembers to keep his breath steady, hopes that no one will see him. The jungle is dark, humid. Summer on the Malabar coast had that distinct smell of musk and leaves, that taste of rotting trees in the air. The night envelops him, caresses his sweat-drenched skin as he digs a hole in soil.

He doesn't look back when he's done.

_The only way to break the curse is to kill the Snake Prince_.

.

It's November when he firsts meets the Boy. Sebastian has spent too many years in the heartless modern world, too many evenings drinking alcohol that failed to kill him and looking at his abandoned riffle like it was some cheap whore. He had grown tired of always changing his name, always making the photographs disappear. Afghanistan had worn him so much. He had come back home, bought back the old family house with stolen money, settled, waited, unable to die.

It's November when he first meets the Boy and Sebastian discovers the dreadful feeling of being a prey.

He's standing at the door and doesn't know what to do with his hands, fidgeting and inspecting the state of his nails. He can't be more than seventeen, his face too round for his sharp eyebrows, all awkward limbs and slightly greasy hair. He's short, an ill-fitting dark green suit hiding his scawny frame, and his bony hands are perfectly steady. Sebastian inspects him from eyehole, opens the door slowly.

The Boy's eyes glint and Sebastian can't help but to notice the reptilian quality of his features. His eyebrows are too thin, too long. They give him an effeminate, mean air. His irises are dark, too dark against his pasty skin and his mouth is made to bite.

Sebastian wait a moment before opening the door, pondering if he should be letting him in. In fact, he knows what he will do, has known it for a long time already. The jungle still whispers the curses in his ears every evening, the roar of the beast still makes him wake up covered in sweat in the middle of the night. The time is now. He can feel it in his stomach.

The Boy looks at him and his stare commands him to move and show him in. Sebastian obeys.

"I've been watching you", he says, and his voice sounds like a delicate hiss. "I would like to speak with you, Sebastian Moran."

They move into his too large kitchen in his too large house in the empty English countryside. The previous owners had changed the original interior into one of those very modern, very bland look. He hasn't bothered to redecorate.

Sebastian cracks his knuckles, his back tense. He takes out his cigarettes and it seems like they glint in their metal case. The Boy looks at him lighting up, doesn't rush him, just watches. His lazy grin reveals braces. He looks ridiculous, like one of those idiots back in the Army, trying to look tough, failing hard at it. Sebastian wonders why he's taking this seriously. Maybe he's wrong. Maybe that's not him, maybe all of this is just bullshit.

He doesn't feel like throwing him out, not yet. He still has hope. There's something dangerous in the Boy's too-dark eyes.

Sebastian breathes. Smoke fills his lungs and he smiles as he expires slowly. He likes it. It doesn't have the same effect it used to have but he still can get himself to enjoy it. Every breath feels a little bit like dying.

"What do you want ?"

His voice sounds tired, Sebastian knows it does and doesn't even try to hide it. He doesn't know why he let in the Boy in in the first place, or maybe he knows it too much. It was the grin, the dangerous grin that whispered _I know, I know_ in that same mannered voice. Sebastian has to resist the urge to smack it out of his face.

"Nothing", he says, smiling as his hands slowly creeps on the table. It tries to touch the cigarette case that lays abandoned on the table, but Sebastian catches it. His bones feel like fragile ice picks under his finger tips and he wonders if the Boy would scream if he broke them. Their eyes meet.

"I just wanted to see the face of a man who has lived for centuries."

.

Sebastian often dreams of the jungle, his hands curled into fists against his pillow. It feels like he can remember every detail of it, the way the sky looked, so pure and vivid, one the raw smell of the forest, the humidity in the air that made his skin glisten with sweat at night. He remembers the long, too hot sunny days spent smoking opium, the stench of dust, spice and perspiration in Bombay, the sound of the trains, the texture of his army uniform against his back. He can walk through his souvenirs, every night, sometimes following the white tigers of the Bengal, his riffle next to his fast-beating heart, sometimes floating in scrumptious numbness on opium smoke, the featherlight touch of foreign fingers on his chest. During the day, all he did was hunt beasts, the terrors of the jungle, were they animals or savages. During the night, all he did was hunt preys, their tanned faces pushed against the pillow, all long limbs and skin, muffled sounds coming out of their delicate mouths.

He could say that those were the best years of his life, the service in India. They had made him the man he was now, in every way. Sebastian likes to think that, with all his money, he could go back, back to India, and hunt tigers and elephants again. The toys are smarter, nicer, and if he wants to make it harder, he can always use the old ones and kill black panthers with a spear. The truth is that he'll never do that. The country he had left had withered and died. He doesn't have the strength to see what happened to Calcutta and the forests of Cashmere.

Sometimes Sebastian dreams of tigers and snakes. He doesn't like those dreams. When everything tastes like ashes in his mouth, when ever scent stinks like rotting flesh, when all the opium in the world fails to make him feel anything close to alive, he takes the the old note out of his old uniform. It's worn out by the years, but it's still miraculously in one piece. He wonders if he should burn it. His fingers linger on the folded paper as he replaces in the wardrobe.

.

The Boy comes back. It's been years but Sebastian remembers, he could not forget. He hasn't moved out of the house, he hasn't aged, he hasn't done anything. He takes walks in the forest once in a while, hunts rabbits and birds that taste like rotten rats when he tries to cook them, buy expensive poison once in a while and drinks it until he curls up in his living-room and vomits his guts out. He is bored, bored, bored, so bored he wishes more than ever to die. He can't.

The Boy comes back but he's not a boy anymore. He carefully perfected his act, all got the little things that were wrong in their previous meeting right. His eyes speak of experience and his hands reek of blood. He still has the annoying grin, but Sebastian has learnt to control himself. The Boy changed his name, changed his voice, changed his suit. It fits him well, all adjusted and evil. The majesty of the pugnacious cobra oozes from the carefully ironed lines of his clothes.

He really is the Prince of the Snakes, ready to attack, ready to stay immobile for days to catch a prey and fast as lightning when come the time to strike. His hands still have that feminine, mandible-like quality to them. Sebastian has to resist the urge to get his fingers around his delicate neck and squeeze.

_Not now_, he tells himself. _Maybe... Maybe not now._

The Boy tells him that he's James Moriarty, that he's got an offer for him, that he's the world only consulting criminal and that he needs him to take over the world. Sebastian smiles as he remembers the words of the Tiger. He looks at his eyes, smiles and says yes.

James Moriarty is a good name and Sebastian just want to see how long he can get himself to live before finally putting an end to it all.

.

Time flies.

Working with James Moriarty isn't boring and that's enough for Sebastian. He kills people, nearly gets killed once in a while, just to keep his blood pumping out of more than just habit. He likes it, more that he thought he would. James Moriarty just floats over his web of lies, his clean hands hidden in his three thousand pounds suit, plotting, creeping, strangling his preys with a snakelike elegance. When he points a man, Sebastian bows his head, aims, grins and pulls the trigger.

He still sleeps with a hunting knife under his bed. It's a nice object, from India, back in the days, a curved blade and ivory mantle. Sebastian likes to use beautiful things to kill. He often dreams of slitting James Moriarty's creamy white throat. He doesn't do it.

_Not yet_, _I don't want to do it yet._

When he gets asked to come to the empty apartment on Baker Street, he sits in a corner, watches a young man laugh, jump, scream and shiver as he writes pages after pages of his little red leather bound notebook. Pictures, numbers, maps, papers, equations, lists fill the white, otherwise bare walls of the large flat, but James Moriarty never buys furniture for it, has at least forty suits squeezed in the only wardrobe available. He doesn't live here, he's far too clever to show Sebastian the place where he actually sleeps, the whole house seeming to be more of and extension of his brain than an actual residence. He seems to like to just lay here, right on the floor, stripping from his expensive clothes as the hours go by and the plans unfold. He ends up in underwear, crouching on the floor like a viper ready to attack, as he orchestrate the assassination of some diplomat in Israel.

Sebastian doesn't talk and turns a bottle of beer into a makeshift ashtray. He cleans his Browning, assemble, disassemble it, and smokes more cigarettes.

Sometimes, when the night seems too long and the numbers can't keep his genius mind occupied, James Moriarty grips Sebastian's chest, his eyes closed, and grins against his neck. Sebastian lets him. He can smell aggression all over his body, the tension in his spine and the way his delicate fingers curl dangerously against the collar of his shirt. Sometimes he wishes that James could just move his hands up and strangle him, because he knows that it is what he really wants.

_I want your lives, I want all of them, I want to see you die and die over and over again because you are mine_, his young, so young body says, pressed against his, and Sebastian stays silent.

James Moriarty never told him if he knew why Sebastian accepted to follow him in his never-ending quest to the top of the world. Sometimes, as he pulls the trigger on another target, Sebastian wishes that it's the case, that James Moriarty knows. It makes it easier.

.

The first time James Moriarty sees Sebastian dead is in Mexico after a rather messy job that could have ended well if those idiot gangster-wannabes hadn't been so stupid. Javier Barro, in all his tacky glory, dark purple suits and shiny guns, had got away with trying to play the Moriarty, for now. Sebastian knows that he won't get the chance to gut the drug baron himself, that is his punishment, James Moriarty will find another way just to piss him off. He wishes he could curse his anger out but his mouth has been completely destroyed by Barro's assistant with a crowbar. Sebastian fucked up and the delivery is gone, all of it. Fucking Colombians.

He's been there, lying in his own blood for a few hours when a black sedan drives into the empty warehouse. The ceilings are cheap tin, the whole place reeks of half-refined cocaine. Cheap jeans and a too large, flashy shirt, James Moriarty steps out of the car and his footsteps resonate on the concrete floor. It's a disguise, a good one, but he has stepped out of character, now that he's not negotiating with low-class thugs. His skin looks like it itches of wearing garments that aren't perfectly unaffordable. The serpentine prince of crime must be pissed. They're alone.

Sebastian's last cardiac arrest goes back to 1964, somewhere in Ukraine, his dead body coming back to life after two days spent in the sewers. The sensation of death eating away his conscience still is vivid in his mind. He doesn't mind dying, not anymore, but it still hurts. Sebastian isn't a masochist, tries his best not to be, although the facts say otherwise.

He wouldn't be following orders from a crazy kid with way too much time on his hands if he wasn't.

James Moriarty grins as he leans over his cold body, his fingers warm against the dead flesh. He touches his nose, caresses the line of his dislocated jaw, gentle, too gentle. It feels good, somehow, but Sebastian can't fully feel it, his senses numbed by the cold feeling of death all over his body. His eyes stay open, he stares at James and James stares back.

"You're a gorgeous corpse. You really are," he softly says as he crouches next to him and starts to empty his sniper's pockets. It takes him a moment to find what he wants and Sebastian can only lay here and wait.

His cigarette case is drenched in blood when James Moriarty retrieves it. He winces as he wipes it with his Sebastian's coat's cuff, uncovering the delicate metalwork that covers it. He has never touched it, Sebastian never allowed him, and James Moriarty loves too much to do things that are defended to resist the opportunity. Sebastian can't help but to notice his amused expression ; he probably thinks that the thing belongs to a museum. His fingers curl experimentally against the lid and he opens it, his teeth showing between his lips.

He puts a slightly damp cigarette between his lips, nips Sebastian's lighter from his coat and smokes it. His nails are red with blood and his lips are firmly curled against the crimson filter.

"Oh, Sebastian," he pouts between two whiffs of smoke.

He takes sharp, fast, precise breaths, like he's an addict, like he can't get enough of this. Sebastian wonders if it's because of the tobacco or his blood in it. James Moriarty doesn't enjoy smoking, even though the cigarettes Sebastian buys are the finest and James Moriarty only likes the finest things. He doesn't take long to grow bored with it, a loving smile on his face as he puts it out on Sebastian collarbone, a nice tingly feeling shooting up the sniper's dead nerves. Sebastian wishes he could smile right now. He can hear his own skin sizzle.

"I wish I could see you like this every day of my life," James Moriarty says as he turns to order his driver to carry the body in the trunk.

.

The name of James Moriarty's new favourite obsession is Sherlock Holmes. Sebastian often wonders why would a little idiot who calls himself a consulting detective catch the attention of a genius consulting criminal. He sighs but never asks questions. Seasons pass by and James Moriarty solves problems. Bombs are planted, people are disposed of. Sebastian sometimes catches himself staring at the lying figure in the empty house on Baker Street, clothes and plans to destroy the universe scattered around it, wondering what sound his flesh would make if he cut it with a switchblade.

Then, at one point, James Moriarty asks him to call him Jim, wears a too-tight v-neck and campy underwear, gets in direct contact with the police, wraps people, ordinary, useless, boring people in Semtex and turns London into a battlefield. Sebastian doesn't understand, tries very hard to but it's useless. It's stupid, James Moriarty knows that it is, he must, and he keeps doing it, looking for trouble, looking for Sherlock Holmes. Sebastian wishes he could bring himself to strangle in his sleep, it would be so easy, James Moriarty is all brain and no muscles, his bones protruding through his skin. He can't, it's too late, he likes the sheer insanity of his new life too much to let go of it now.

"Sebastian, Sebastian, I am bored, so, so, so bored, Sebastian," James Moriarty breathes, his hands behind his head, half-asleep on a pile of half-drafted equations.

"Is this why you called me ?"

James Moriarty's chest rises and fall slowly to the rhythm of his respiration. He smirks, his eyelids closed.

"No."

Sebastian uncrosses his arms, digs out a knife from his coat pocket. It's cold from the walk outside and, as he wipes it, it glisten in the sunlight. James Moriarty slowly rises, his eyes circled. He probably skipped sleep last night, given the quantity of paper dispersed around him. He stretches his arm at Sebastian, his teeth showing between his lips.

_Of course._

Their gazes meet as James Moriarty get a hold of the weapon's handle. Sebastian tries to figure how his eyes would feel against his nails if he gorged them out. Soft, he imagines. He has yet to find out what is the real taste of James Moriarty's blood.

When he comes back to life the next day, looks at himself in the apartment's only mirror and sees the name Sherlock Holmes carved on his chest, he closes his eyes and lets a sigh escapes his lips. James Moriarty is sitting on the window sill with a pair of sunglasses, looking at the other side of the street, smiling. He makes a waving gesture at Sebastian without turning his head.

"Morning, early bird. We're stealing the Crown Jewels today."

.

It always comes back to this. The Empty House on Baker Street. That's the way he decided to call it. It fits. Sebastian still owns the family estate in Sussex but he rarely goes there anymore. He sleeps on the floor like he used to when James Moriarty was still alive. He still dreams of destroying him, of opening his skull and plant a blade through his genius mind. But he can't and he hates it. He had failed, in the end. When Sherlock Holmes had thrown himself to his death, Sebastian had had to bite his lips to keep himself from screaming.

James Moriarty wasn't an idiot, at least not that much. He had never nourished vain hopes that his empire would actually leave any kind of mark after his death. Sometimes, he takes advantage of the general chaos that shakes London's criminal underground to go and shoot a gangster or two in an empty back alley. Everything around Sebastian is falling apart in a very methodical way. Of course, _he_ had planned it all to never outlive hims. Sebastian will, though. He'll live forever.

Sometimes, when he's coming off another shot of cyanide that makes his whole body curl in pain on the floor, he opens the freezer he installed in the empty kitchen after that day at St-Bartholomew, lifts James Moriarty's frozen body and talks to it. He's already more or less destroyed his face when he found him on the rooftop, wishing, wishing so hard he had been the one to put a bullet in his brain. But he didn't and Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes is dead but Sebastian is still alive, always, forever.

He takes out his L9A1 and fires two more shots into James Moriarty's chest. It makes a hollow sound and the whole corpse shakes under the impact. Sebastian starts to tell himself that he should get rid of it one day but he doesn't do it. It feels right, to have company.

He'll have to wait for another thousand reincarnations. He has time for another cigarette.


End file.
